After reading this, I hereby issue a full retraction and would like to tell you all that kung fu grippe is my favoritest blog in the world right now.

When I emerged, my hands still gripping the wheel, I was perplexed but thrilled — happy to be alive, but also to be surrounded by the parties of this case, as well as the train’s lucky passengers. We were all in miraculously hale condition, considering the ordeal we’d just endured. We laughed openly.

But, even in the channel’s cool waters — and newly stricken with the permanent nerve damage that has frozen my face in a ghastly and stupefied stare — I could feel my blood begin to boil. My boat. My beautiful yellow boat. What had he done to her?

I love Merlin Mann. Even though his signal to noise ratio often gets a bit low for me to tolerate, without fail he eventually comes up with a gem that makes me want to resubscribe to all his feeds.
Case in point:

Now that I’ve had it both ways, I can highly recommend choosing to make things you like with people you think are awesome. By comparison, the private consolations of doing otherwise turn out to be surprisingly modest.

Yes. Yes, indeed.

(I'm still not going to follow the guy on Twitter, though. The last time I tried it was like drinking from a fire hose.)

Check out the big funny on Rod!
My favorite part is the little bio line: "Rod Hilton is a writer and, in his spare time, he enjoys tearing Hollywood a new asshole over at The Editing Room." What's the matter Rod? Don't want the masses to know you're a computer programmer for a living? I see how it is... ;)

First, a pointer for y'all to check out Inked Inc., a Ning-powered social site for "counterculture professionals".
The site is very young at this point, so it's been kind of fun so far. The biggest thing working for the site so far has been the participation of Marisa from Needled. She's the coolest.

PSA over, I'll just mention that I've started blogging about my next tattoo there.

The Next One
A week from today I have a consultation with my artist, Fish at Th'Ink Tank Tattoos in Denver, about my next tattoo. So, what am I going to get? Well, it kind of depends...

I've become a "scrobbling" addict lately. I'm especially concerned with my last.fm profile accurately demonstrating my overall musical tastes, so I'll tailor my day-to-day listening to try and balance out any temporary flights of fancy I might have (Like the Monkees binge I'm on right now, thanks to Merlin.).
Nothing feeds into this obsession more than this Mainstream-o-meter, which compares your top 30 artists with everyone else. My results are skewed due to a couple audiobooks and a few artists that really shouldn't be ranked as high on my list as they actually are currently.

Interesting observations that illustrate an obvious "last.fm users vs. the rest of the real world" bias:

Elliot Smith and Sufjan Stevens are more "mainstream" than The Beach Boys.

The Beatles and Radiohead are both above 100%, they are so mainstream.

When I read about this my first thought was "Hell yeah!" But that's just how I am. I get excited about the new alterna-burlesque and roller girls and stuff like that. Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School is right up that same alley.
Then I read their "start your own" page and actually started to consider it. Of course, the truth is I would have ended up buying the coloring book and that would have been that.
Lucky for me and everyone else of my ilk in and around Denver, someone beat me to it. It should be no surprise that RMRG's scariest roller girl, Pinky 500, is involved.

Farecast.com is probably the coolest travel site I've seen yet. It tells you when airfare is going to be cheapest and whether you should go ahead and buy your tickets now for that trip to Las Vegas in November or if you should wait a while for optimum pricing. It can also tell you which departure days (or which destination) will get you the best prices, if your schedule is flexible.
When the beta first launched they only had Seattle and Boston as departure cities, so it wasn't really useful yet. Now they've just added Denver, so they have 55 or so cities. All the destinations I've cared about recently are in there.

It turns out I get a lot of hits for the search term "tattoo blog" (As I'm looking at it right this second, this post comes up in the number 2 spot, and tops for the plural).
I just thought I'd take a second to give props to the number one result, TattooBlog.org, which is actually a new find for me. The stuff posted there is hit or miss for my tastes, but I'm always down for more tattoo-related reading material.

So, cork'd is pretty cool. Nice to see Dan & Dan doing cool stuff together.
I'm not a real wine aficionado - my wine tastes aren't very refined. I like it that way, though. I tend to enjoy $10-15 bottles as much as something that costs $70+. I figure that's a good thing.

Anyway, I'm on there as JakoBlah (or you can search for "Sutton"), even though I don't expect to use it very much.

I do wish something like this existed for beer. I'd have some fun with that. Unfortunately, as far as i know, there aren't any good online beer merchants you could partner with for some commerce kickback (cork'd is hooked up with wine.com). Booze would be fun, too, though, and I know there are plenty of decent online liquor retailers...